At heart, the movie is a film about race that is intended for
a largely white, mass audience. No
matter how well intended or potentially progressive a project is, this goal
inevitably creates certain well-known problems. Kathryn Stockett’s book, The Help, on which the movie was based, must have appealed to the film’s
producers precisely because it had a white woman at the center with whom a mass
audience could identify. Since the
contrasting behavior of the white people was central to the film’s narrative, there
had to be so many white people in it that there was little room for black
characters. The two main maids, Aibileen
played by Viola Davis and Minny played by Octavia Spencer, had to represent virtually
all black women. The Minny character
particularly suffered from this problem; she had to be funny, sassy, lovable, mean,
domestically abused, brave, and more.
Only a great actor could carry all that off as well as Spencer.
We all know that, usually, race movies designed to attract
white audiences are to be avoided. But a
movie about black maids: we had to go
see it! Our mothers and grandmothers scrubbed
and bowed so we could become black intellectuals. Someone more poetic than I has to say what
those women mean to us. I can’t resist
the desire to proudly proclaim that my mother worked as a maid from time to
time, even though that was not her primary identification when I was growing
up. I was lucky to get my first job cleaning
a store at 14 because my aunt who was a well-respected domestic worker
recommended me. These women are close to
my heart.
I don’t know about my colleagues and friends; but I had
mixed emotions as I watched The Help. There was something so appealing about the
way Viola Davis played her part that even people who hated the film wanted her
to get best actress awards. That so many
praised her performance made me feel that I wasn’t the only one who had
conflicting emotions about the movie. How
could she be so separated from the rest of the movie? Was there something about the contrast
between her role and that of Cecily Tyson’s that has meaning for us? I know I wanted to hide in a hole when Tyson
was on the screen.
I’ve seen my sister scholars complain that too many
realities about black maids’ lives were left out. Where was the reference to sexual harassment,
they demand. To me, that seems more like
a criticism that should be made of a documentary than a feature film. More troubling is the charge that The Help downplays the dangers and
systematic oppressiveness of the Jim Crow South. I hope my sister scholars will allow me the
room to present an alternate view.
By focusing on the relationships between black and white
women, the movie is able to show the daily, bitter humiliations that women
faced. In fact, the film is unusual for
its emphasis on white women’s racist pasts and the horrors of the domestic
sphere. And, it was very clear that
those women were ready to resist Jane Crow wherever and whenever they
could. Those old segregated, rattle-trap
buses that delivered women from the ghettoes to the white areas were meant to remind
us of Rosa Parks’ heroic deeds. The
shooting of Megar Evers was suppose to indicate how dangerous life was for
blacks in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi.
The state was there to enforce white women’s policing of black women’s
behavior. The domestic worker who ended
up in jail—whose name, ironically, I can’t seem to find online—represented that
story.
While I was writing this post, a South African friend Skyped
Ellen and asked if we had seen the The
Help. She and her girlfriend had
just been to see it and wanted to know what we thought of it. This is a woman who grew up with a live-in
domestic worker as a mother. The mother’s ‘liberal’ employers were relatively
generous but seemed blissfully unaware of the toll that umama’s absence took on her own children. Our friend cried during the movie; it touched
something deep inside her.
I’m not trying to legitimate my view of the film by
presenting an ‘authentic’ response to The
Help. I’m sure the reasons the film
touched our friend are as complex as the reasons that make us have conflicting
emotions and responses to it. I mention
it because it reminds me of what Stuart Hall teaches us: the meanings of
cultural products are never fixed as good or bad or positive or negative.
